Hi, my name is Weiju Cheng and I'm from the National University Cancer Institute in Singapore. So in this meeting, I spoke about high-risk myeloma, how we define these patients, and the very fact that today we have a new classification system developed by the International Myeloma Society that is based on cytogenetics information. Now these are routine clinical tests that we can do in the clinic using FISH to identify the different translocations and copy number gains that already in clinic today we can use to classify patients into high-risk. However, one of the things that emerged from my talk is that this on its own is probably not enough because there is still a significant percentage of patients that have very bad that will not be detected by this current standard panel. And the additional information that we'll need may sometimes include clinical parameters such as extramedullary disease, the isotype of myeloma, or some information coming from genomic sequencing like RNA sequencing to derive a high-risk signature. Now these tests today is not yet available in the clinic, but there are rapid development and validation of the assays that we are hopeful in the coming two to three years they may well become more available. And the important thing about having better methods in identifying high-risk patients is because today, despite all the improvement in the treatment and outcomes for myeloma the benefit has been predominantly seen in the patients with standard risk disease, whereas in the high-risk patients the benefit has been much less significant. So it's important to define these group of patients so that we can define better clinical trials and develop better treatment to improve their outcomes, but partly also if we can understand why these patients are doing so badly, we can develop better newer drugs that may benefit this patient as well. And so hopefully we can improve the outcomes of high-risk patients in years to come.
HealthTree • October 9, 2024